With the increasing popularity of the Internet and digital photography, the Internet becomes a platform for millions of users to store, print, and share digital photos via various online photo service providers. Snapfish (www.snapfish.com) is an example of a conventional online photo service provider. The process typically involves taking photos with a digital camera and uploading the digital photos to an online photo service provider's website. From there, a user may view, print, or share the digital photos with friends and family members. Typically, the user would access the online photo service provider's website using a uniform resource locator (URL) and a unique login and password. The user may then manipulate the digital photos, such as create multiple albums, provide image names, send images to friends and family, and provide shared access to certain images. Alternatively, websites may serve as a general repository, for example as a posting website, and anyone using the correct URL would have access to the images.
One problem with conventional online photo service providers' websites is that they do not provide the same ease of use the user is accustomed to on her computer. For example, conventional websites would provide a browser window and allow a user to select her photos by clicking a selection box associated with each photo image within the browser window on the website; or by clicking a “select all” box that would select all the photos. However, if the user wants to select a group of the photos, for example twenty photos from a particular trip, the user would have to select one photo at a time, which is a time consuming process.
Another problem with conventional photo websites is that while a group of thumbnail images are being selected and dragged, the thumbnail images remain to be the same size while they are being moved, which often block the view of a large portion of the browser window. Moreover, the conventional photo website does not inform the user the number of thumbnail images being dragged. Yet another problem with convention photo websites is that the browser window does not display the maximum number of digital photo images while the size of the browser has been changed.
Yet another problem with the conventional photo websites is that the user's interim selection of the photos is not preserved when the user navigates to another web page, for example to retrieve other information. Thus, when the user returns to the web page of the conventional photo service provide, the previously photo selection may not have been recorded. This is particularly burdensome when the user needs to go to different websites to gather multiple photos for a photo album.
Yet another problem of the conventional photo websites is that when selecting from a large collection of digital photos, the user would have to traverse the browser window up and down multiple times in order to move a selection of thumbnail images from subsequent pages to the first page of the browser window for storage. This is because the storage location of the user's photo selection is typically displayed in the first page. When the user navigates to the subsequent pages, the storage location is no longer in the current view of the browser window. Such method of selecting photos by traversing up and down the browser window is inefficient and not easy to use.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method that address these issues of the conventional photo websites. In particular, there is a need for a method and system for maintaining persistent photo storage on a website.